Bullet train: The insanity escalates

The devotion of Gov. Jerry Brown to the, ahem, troubled California bullet-train project he inherited used to be tough to fathom. After the events of last week, Brown’s loyalty is beyond belief.

On Thursday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority admitted in The Los Angeles Times that it had without public notice rewritten its rules on bidding for construction of the first 29-mile segment of the train system. This was done so the authority could take a first step toward awarding the contract to the cheapest bidder – the Tutor Perini-Zachary-Parsons joint venture. The Tutor bid of $985 million to link the Central Valley cities of Madera and Fresno was hundreds of millions of dollars less than other bids.

But under the original rules, Tutor shouldn’t have even been eligible. Of the five bidders, Tutor was judged to have the least technical expertise when it came to the engineering, design quality, project approach and other issues related to building a high-speed rail segment. Only the three bidders with the top technical ratings were supposed to have been eligible for the contract. And the rail authority’s attorney said earlier this year that only “non-substantive” changes to the process were supposed to be allowed.

How can Brown countenance this flouting of honest governance? How can any bullet-train supporter?

This is especially so given the extraordinary complexity of the project. It was for good reason that engineering competence was initially emphasized. Then there’s also this fact: Tutor has often faced complaints over the quality of its work and cost overruns.

Which brings us to another headline from last week. Quentin Kopp, a former chairman of the rail authority board who is considered the father of the bullet train project, told the Times that the first segment should have been between Los Angeles and San Diego, not in the Central Valley. Kopp said what the governor wants to build simply isn’t a true statewide bullet train – which is what voters were promised in 2008 when they authorized $9.95 billion in bond seed money for the project.

The “blended” system that Brown seeks would use bullet trains from the southern end of Silicon Valley with northern Los Angeles County to link to regular rail in the Bay Area and the L.A. metro area. This wouldn’t come close to meeting the legal requirement that passengers could get from San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes.

Voters passed the bullet train after being fed propaganda about project cost, ticket cost, ridership, job creation and much more. In the five years since, the rail authority has never come up with a plausible financing plan for a statewide system or a legal way to attract investors. Now it’s no longer even proposing a statewide bullet train.

If the governor thinks this recitation of real problems is “declinist,” he is betraying the Californians who trusted him to competently lead this state.